A Personal Letter From Our Founder and Director of Education- Margery Hinman, CMT, CEO
Welcome to MT Advantage Career Center!
A lot of people have asked me why I started in this career. It was simply my love of words and the English language combined with my fascination of the human body that made MT the perfect profession for me. When I was directing my first medical transcription service, it quickly became apparent that the market was full of medical transcriptionists who took a quick, three month program locally and didn't have the knowledge we needed our employees to have. At the time, we were transcribing with tapes and our transcriptionists were local, so were able to conduct an intense training/feedback period (training which we perfected over the years) with many of our new MTs. Some of those newly "graduated" MTs from the local program took up to three months just to bring them up to basic industry standards so they could transcribe for our service.
When I met and became friends with a single mother who had spent nine months going to transcription school full-time (paid for by the state) and who could not even pass an employment test, the vision of a school came to me – a school that could pick up where the others left off and teach transcription as it should be taught - a school that would not compromise quality just to hurry its graduates through the doors – and most importantly, a school where graduates could go directly to working on the job after graduation without having to be retrained or taught something that was missed previously. It is with this friend in mind that the idea of putting together a medical transcription program soon became a reality.
The program had to be tough. It had to be rigorous. It had to make sure the graduate was not just average, but rather an expert, on subjects like English and grammar, formatting and style, medical terminology, common diagnostic tests and up-to-date pharmaceutical information. The student would have to know not one, not two, but TWENTY different specialties in order to pass our program. Most importantly, the student would have to be taught extensive technical information such as the Internet, FTP, and beginning, intermediate, and advanced Microsoft Word. Finally, the student would have to have an acceptable typing speed, the ability to transcribe any type of report quickly and accurately the first time, and use superior judgment in the many decisions needed to make a medical record complete. They had to know all this information AS WELL AS knowing the AAMT (American Association for Medical Transcription) Book of Style rules, which is the bible on style for this industry. This was a lot to ask of ANY transcription course, but with our transcription service needing more and more transcriptionists, there was no choice – and so the MT Advantage program was begun.
My
personal experience with mentoring so many individuals and teaching
medical transcription at the college nearby had polished my teaching
skills. Many long talks with the college directors and several other
high-level instructors there helped me to understand exactly HOW people
learn best in an online program. Too many online courses, they had
said, were just cut and dry. Boring was the term they used, and of
course, boring wouldn’t help our students learn everything they
had to learn.
So our goal at MT Advantage
was to teach these advanced transcription techniques by creating an
interactive and fun, online learning environment. At the
same time we continued to add more course content and more high quality
transcription practice than ever before. Our students tell us we've
more than met our goals in both these areas.
It’s with this knowledge that we put together what some are
now calling the most advanced medical transcription program available
today. This was a two-year ongoing project with many interesting twists
and turns. However, seeing the dream come true for some of our graduates
is well worth the effort it took to pull this all together.
Most of our students now
in the latter part of the course have already had job offers, some
so good that they had to make the decision to start the new job or
finish the course to get their diploma! This is because we took the
time to put the course together right – from the MTs point of
view – rather than from an instructor’s point of view,
while still remembering what an employer is looking for. After all,
we are an employer too! With professional materials and references,
computer skills training, and uncompromising quality, MT Advantage
developed before our very eyes into a massive project. By looking
at the enrollments over the last several months and the many transcriptionists
that have gone through our program, I am happy to say that our hard
work has been well worth it. The MT Advantage program has proven to
be a success. 
On our website here we offer a demonstration page so you can get a feel for the program. We also have a typing test so you can practice with your typing speed, and audio files where you can hear medical terms pronounced. As an added bonus and because we are so sure of our program, we offer you immediate, temporary access to the course so you can get a feel for how interactive and comprehensive, yet fun, learning with MT Advantage can be. The tour of our site will give you an idea of what medical transcriptionists actually do on the job and what it takes to get there. In addition, we have included a number of our favorite articles here that will help you get a good understanding of the medical transcription profession and our school in particular.
Again, thank you for visiting, and we wish you every success in pursuing your career goals and financial dreams. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. Your education is our #1 goal.
Margery Hinman, CMT, Director
margery@mtacc.net
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